Sunday, September 27, 2009

Every so often a venue opens up where ones success is only limited by the audacity and grandness of ones dreams. As I look around the world I see random events. Things happening just because they ended up that way, good things and bad, especially the bad. As I look around I also see something crazy great, the Internet and the communities being built on it, free to create connections across time from the past to the present, across geography from one culture to another, and across wealth with few barriers of cost. So the stage is set. We can take our dreams of how we wish the world worked and begin to change it from this dreary place where we have to live with what we happen to randomly get, to a place where everything that needs to happen does.

Truth Telling

The world is hard to understand. Our brains have a go at it and often get it wrong. Its part of the everyday. The trouble is that recognizing a mistake is often more difficult than making the mistake to begin with. And its not fun to be wrong. In fact being wrong about a major life choice can be a disaster (religion is an example). Not many people go looking for all the ways they are wrong. The nice thing about the world though is that there are experiences where the truth of something leaps out with a good chance of being right, a truth telling event. As a programmer, every day I build something that if it is faulty I have only myself to look to as the cause. I come face to face with my mistakes and how I make them, day after day. And I think this is the best way to find the truth, to go looking for it, to inundate ones mind with views and perspectives where you can experience that moment where the truth leaps out with clarity, even if it is a disaster.

Luxury

What do you value? When have you been happy ? ... Not the giddy rush of adrenaline but the moment that you remember with quiet earth-shaking tears of joy. Was it material ? ... something constructed with great precision and difficulty like a watch or a car? ... Or was it a moment where a dream touched Earth and became real. Dreams of action, of wrongs corrected, of dignity restored, of possibilities never before seen, of diseases cured, of space explored, of the environment saved, of lives changed. Would you exchange one form of luxury for the other? Would you draw a line above which you gave away to change the world, perhaps forever? Your money is your vote.

The Culture of Work

Do you have a career? Do you acquire job skills? Do you think about peddling your skill set among the highest bidders? And at the end of the day you take your money and do what you really want to do? Does this skew economic activity toward the basic necessities and what people do in their free time? What is money in an economy supposed to do? First and foremost it allows people to specialize and be more productive and then trade their services in a free market. All of their own free will with no central organizer and it all works wonderfully. Well not quite. Ever try to start a business? It often takes allot of work to put things together before their is a profit to keep things going. So most people settle for working for someone else, serving the interest of a business, perhaps a large one. What if you don’t like your job ? How much misery is endured by people around the globe simply as a result of a lack of choices brought about by the high barrier of creating a business and that business's inability to find those few that would love to work there? If you could solve that problem you could change the culture of work. People would set out to accomplish some activity instead of having a career. They would create businesses around something they love. What people do with their daily time might actually matter to them beyond just income. People might invest in businesses they love, maybe more just to get it done. What would get accomplished then? Would we call it work?